Since the early 1990's, the number of people using the World Wide Web has grown at a substantial rate. As more users take advantage of the World Wide Web, they generate higher and higher volumes of traffic over the Internet. As the benefits of commercializing the Internet can be tremendous, businesses increasingly take advantage of this traffic by advertising their products or services on-line. These advertisements may appear in the form of leased advertising space (e.g., “banners”) on websites or advertisements on digital television, which are comparable to rented billboard space in highways and cities or commercials broadcasted during television or radio programs.
Advertisers may create advertising campaigns that include many advertisements to be placed on websites during a specified period of time. For example, an automobile company may design several advertisements for a new model and may wish to have the advertisements placed during a three-week period around the launch of the new model. Each time one of the advertisements is shown to a user is known as an “impression.” When shown the advertisement, the user may select, or “click,” on the advertisement or may take another “action” such as completing an online form to request more information. If the user later purchases the new model automobile, the purchase is referred to as a “conversion” of the impression.
Advertisers may be interested in impressions (e.g., if they are trying to increase awareness of a brand), clicks (e.g., if they are trying to provide more information about a product), or conversions (e.g., if they are trying to make sales or get new users to sign up for services). Advertisers may pay based on, for example, impressions, clicks, or conversions over the course of an advertising campaign. An advertiser may have a spending plan that specifies how the advertiser wishes to spend its budget during a campaign. For example, the advertiser may wish to spend money only on certain days during the campaign, or may wish to spend evenly over every day of the campaign.
It is accordingly an object of the invention to provide methods and systems to control the expenditure of an advertiser's budget over the course of an advertising campaign, for example, by smoothing revenue or impression volume.